What is baseball?

What is baseball?

After watching (or, more accurately, re-waching) four baseball films and meditating on the sport through the lens of our proposed follow up documentary, something simple came to me: baseball is a vehicle, not the end game. Where it takes us is much more important that what it does. It serves as a support system, a spine of sorts, that allows us to fill in the details around. The four “baseball films” and their true intent seem to bear that truth out. 

The Final Season – It’s about saving a small town in Iowa

Eight Men Out – It’s about corruption

Field of Dreams – It’s about healing and fulfilling a dream

The Natural – It’s about redemption

It’s the same with Boys of Summer. Though it leans heavily upon baseball, it’s not about baseball. It’s about relationships – fathers and sons, fans and teams, indivduals and their bodies which are doing strange things.  

Baseball is a great sport. At the same time, it’s a bit of a dumb animal. It can’t, by itself, do anything. It can be played in a way that can move people to terrific heroics on one hand and murder on the other. In that sense, again, it is a conduit, a mirror and a vehicle.

Where do you want it to take you?

For players, it may be fame, fortune, the thrill of feeling what their bodies are capable of. For owners, it may be money, ancillary properties and the ability to build and maintain a public trust.

For fans it’s the thrill of taking part in a lucid, voyeuristic dream – one that makes the impossible seem possible. The slowness at which the game is played fuels that serenity. The daily grind itches at one’s soul, not allowing it to leave until it is scratched…only to itch again the next day.

I want baseball to take us all on the road - both literally and figuratively. I want to share this journey with those I’ve met before and those we’ll meet anew. I want to talk about dreams and fears, life and death. I want the latest and greatest minds on PD to share what has changed ten years later and where hope lies today. I want to experience the greatness of the people of America, the adventure of the road and a game of catch with my dad and my son at once. I want to help build a new generation and allow people’s stories to be heard by all.

Baseball is a vehicle. It sits by the side of the road, ready to take us wherever our dreams allow. It doesn’t ask for much beyond daily attention. While that may sound like a lot, the return is infinite.

The Boys of Summer - Second Base, sequel to the award-winning first documentary, began principal photography on March 13, 2014. We need your help. Please visit our kickstarter page and share it with your friends and family.

Eight Men Out

We're up, we're live and ready to hit the road in the summer of 2014. I hope you'll take a look at our kickstarter page and share it with anyone you think might be interested. Film research review #2:

Eight Men Out (1988)

Director: John Sayles

Cast: John Cusack, Christopher Lloyd, John Mahoney, Charlie Sheen

Eight Men Out is an strangely romantic movie about the periphery of baseball much more than the game itself. Often beautifully shot, with detailed sets and wardrobe that make one feel like he is looking in on a fine piece of art, it is a spectacle. At the same time, there is a great deal of unevenness that makes it a hard film to really sink into. The performances of the actors are, by and large, very solid. None of them have enough time on screen to make a deep impression on the audience, though John Cusack probably comes the closest with his portrayal of Buck Weaver. The actual play of the game on screen, which is often a hallmark of how “realistic” a sports movie is believed to be, is pretty shoddy. The actors were likely chosen for their ability to act, first, which is understandable – but still puts the audience in the rather uncomfortable position to have to accept what is being fed to them, even if it doesn’t add up. For example, David Strathairn, as Eddie Cicotte, is throwing what look 40 mile per hour meatballs that I’m supposed to believe are unhiytable pitches enough to allow him to win 29 games in a season. It’s the sports filmmakers burden – how real do the sequences have to be? I would argue as real as possible, particularly if it’s supposed to be showing the best of an era, which the “Black Sox” were repeatedly said to be.

The obvious point through all of this is that Eight Men Out is not about baseball so much as the scandal of this particular team. It’s about corruption. It’s about power. It’s about authority and who ultimately holds it. Cusack’s soap box moment with the neighborhood kids near the end of the film where he talks about the beauty of the game and how he still feels it as a kid is one of the stronger moments in the film for baseball purists. What he says speaks to the simplicity of the game, the part of it most fans (or at least this one) wishes could be the focus. That’s not to knock this film’s subject matter as it was very important and, in some ways, strengthens the importance of baseball in America’s history. History, in fact, is probably the biggest thing baseball has going for it against the other major sports. So even when the history isn’t perceived as positive, it’s still an opportunity for the game to be seen for what we wish it were and it sometimes still is.